Anyone who has a passing interest in marketing will have likely heard about a sales funnel. While most have heard of them, many marketers tend to stay away from them for fear of the unknown. This is a fair point as they can seem complicated from the outside, but once you learn more about them, you will be kicking yourself that you didn’t set one up sooner. By the end of the post, you will better understand what they are and what is required to set one up.
In Simple Terms, What Is A Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel, also known as a lead generation system, is a marketing strategy that helps businesses convert visitors into customers. It helps increase the conversion rate by organizing your visitor’s experience and simplifying their decision-making process while converting them into paying customers for your business. A sales funnel will help you sell more and get more of your visitors to buy your products or services. You can find out more by watching webinars and visiting online resources which show you the true power of these marketing tools. Once you understand what they are, you will begin to see their potential in increasing revenue along with their lifetime value. In this way, you obtain valuable leads from which, when nurtured well, can be used to promote a variety of other products or services down the line.
How Does A Sales Funnel Work?
An effective sales funnel is a series of steps or processes that guide prospects through a marketing campaign. They are typically composed of four key components:
- Awareness: The first step in any sales funnel is awareness. This step usually involves creating articles on the company/brand/product that are published online and reaching out to potential leads offline. It can also include advertising and influencer outreach campaigns to draw more traffic to your landing page.
- Interest: During the interest stage, consumers are researching options, comparing prices, and researching alternatives. Identify this opportunity and take advantage of it with amazing content that your customers will find helpful.
- Decision: In the sales funnel, the decision stage is when the customer is prepared to buy. This is a delicate moment and one that you will ultimately end up optimizing over time so you can consistently influence potential customers to make a purchase.
- Action: It is at this point where the customer will finally decide to buy. Your customer becomes an integral part of your business ecosystem when they purchase your product or service.
How Do You Create A Funnel?
Now that you have a basic understanding of what a sales funnel is and how it can benefit your business, you might be wondering how to actually set one up.
Understand Your Target Audience
Your sales funnel becomes more powerful as you learn more about your audience. Not everyone is your customer. Rather, you should aim your marketing efforts at people who will be interested in your products. If you have an existing business, you should already have a decent understanding of the type of person who buys your products. If not, you will need to perform market research to know who you should be targeting.
Create A Landing Page
A landing page is a web page that offers potential customers an opportunity to interact with your company. It is the first step of any marketing campaign. Landing pages are mainly used on websites to drive conversions. They are designed to quickly capture users’ attention, build trust, and provide valuable information before deciding what to do next. It should be laser-focused and include information that directly addresses their pain points. Furthermore, it must be geared towards moving visitors onto the next stage of the funnel, such as either signing up to an email list or buying something. When you collect emails to sell products to later, you should nurture the list to ensure you retain the majority of subscribers.
Don’t Forget The Upsells
Upselling is an integral part of any marketing campaign as it provides you with extra revenue and benefits your customers by giving them offers relevant to their initial purchase. These could be additional tools that they can use to maximize the use of the thing they bought. For example, if you sell a plugin that uses a credit system to work, you could upsell extra credits. Or it might be a browser-based image editing software with an upsell of a collection of stock-free images they use with it, etc.
There’s no mystery to building a sales funnel. It just takes some basic steps and some testing. The benefits, however, are massive when you do it right, and they will continue to provide for decades to come.
